The Years (Oppenheim)

by James Oppenheim

The Years

BY JAMES OPPENHEIM

THE cities of America stand with arms of railroads reaching toward one another, and hands linked, and, swaying with life, they sing and whisper to one another over the wires and through the mail-bags. Yearly they draw closer together, reaching their arms about one another's necks, a solemn yet wild sisterhood. The plains, the hills, and the valleys come with gifts to adorn and feed the tall sisters, and the sisters give back gold and laughter and song. But though their faces are beautiful, their garments are soiled with slums.

Pittsburg, I think, is their siren—a smoky city, whose hair by day drifts gray over the darkening streets, and by night is gusts of fire flaring a lightning along the rivers. There she stands, a sky-scraper city set among a Y of rivers, and all circled with workshops and mills and mines. Her gift to the world is the bone-work of civilization—steel. And she is pitiless as Steel herself, a true siren luring men and women, and crushing them in her infernos. But what are men and women compared with white-hot, ten-ton ingots, the Bessemer converter, and the eight vapor-plumed pipes of the blast-furnace?

I had been wandering about the dusky city for a week, by day over the bridges to Alleghany and Homestead and McKees' Rocks, by night up and down Fifth Avenue—all a blaze of wild advertisements, sparkling shops, theaters and trolley-cars and tides of laughing people, a gash of brilliance among the darkened sky-scrapers, and each day I gained a deeper sense of life's oppression. Inevitably, then, on Thursday morning I revisited Crofton Hospital, where once I had been orderly for four absorbing months.

I remember the smell of antiseptic and the cool hush of the white entrance after the withering, sun-stricken streets. Panhurst, clean, capable, quick, a blue-eyed modern fighter, sat at his desk in the little superintendent's room under a whizzing electric fan.

"Any orders, doctor?" I whispered.

He swung round.

"Thaddeus Stevens!" He was up and gripping my hand, and I smelt faint carbolic about him, and three years fell from me. "Bully! Where did you drop from?"

"Out of the everywhere," I laughed, "into the here."

He put a few sharp questions, and then he looked me over.

"You're not hunting for work, are you?"

"Not unless I have to," I said, wryly.

"We're hard pressed." He leaned near and spoke confidentially. "I could break the rule and take you on again as orderly."

"What's the trouble?"

"Partly heat—a bunch of sick babies, a lot of prostrations, D. T.'s—and there's an epidemic of typhoid. You've heard of the Logan Mine disaster, haven't you?"

I nodded. He spoke with crisp, professional interest:

"Forty-two killed, you know, and seventy mangled ones here. We're badly crowded. You'd better come on."

"It's too hot."

He put a hand lightly on my shoulder.

"Never mind. Think it over. I've got fo get busy now. Foot it with me."

So we made the tour of the white wards;—in one, babies, assorted as many as twelve to a bed, and a heart-breaking crying, not to be listened to; in another, women, blissful with a peace they never knew on the streets or in the child-cluttered kitchen; in another, youths and men in all attitudes of suffering or convalescence, and, perhaps worst, the typhoid ward with its delirious mutterings. But everywhere the uniformed nurses and orderlies tripping softly, and everywhere Panhurst showing sharp vision and precise thought, a general in the field against disease. Yes, everywhere there was a valiant, almost joyful battle to save human life and to abolish pain.

Yet I felt overborne with tragedy, feeling the beautiful, flaming city creating steel out of the agony, the poverty, and the death of her people, filling her hospitals, asylums, and jails with the failures, and her shanties and shacks with the fierce bread-struggle of the toilers. This then, I thought, is modern civilization; this is what machinery and cities cost the race. And how, I asked myself, does life persist in the face of this? What keeps the race going—besides sheer grit? I was free; my life was worth while; but these others?

Promising Panhurst to "think it over," I went out again on the sun-stricken streets, but my heart seemed dark with the tramp of humanity, the oppressed generations heroically clinging to a scheme of things that shattered them; and looking at the somewhat grimy people about me, I wanted to escape, to run off to the cool silences of the north woods or to the oblivion of the sea.

Then, loitering moodily along Fifth Avenue that afternoon, I paused and gazed absently in at a window full of imitation gems sparkling under skilfully placed electrics. A man, mopping his forehead, slouched beside me, peering eagerly. I turned and looked at him. And then I touched the hot plate-glass for support, while Pittsburg vanished from about me and a strange, sad joy filled me. I couldn't be quite sure after twenty-six years, and yet I could not be mistaken.

"Say," I murmured, softly, "are you Felix Storn?"

He turned and stared vacantly at me.

"Thad," I whispered.

He still stared. Then a queer, frightened look came to his eyes, and his voice lifted from his heart of hearts.

"Thad!"

Our eyes were blinded as we seized each other. The simple tragedy, the solemn miracle of it all was unbelievable. For we both must have been shaken by the same thought: that the world is the shadow of a dream, that in youth we saw it through a rainbow, and that the rainbow had vanished, and the face we thought young was wrinkled. Felix and I had been next-door neighbors in old Yorkville, New York City, from boyhood up to manhood; we had grown as one; and it flashed on me that when I had left him, his first-born had just died and the young man's heart was broken. He had come up to my little hall-room, and sat, his face turned from the light, and had spoken very simply:—

"Laura didn't feel it when she was in bed—the kid was only five days old—but when she got up and saw its clothes and the empty crib, and when she went out walking and saw a baby on the street"—here he wept openly—"well, Thad, that's the way women are. She goes looking for it three or four times a day. We'll never get over this."

Then I had gone my way, and when I returned the Storns had departed. So I glanced timidly to see how he had borne the years, and I saw him looking shyly at me. He was a fine-looking man, not yet fifty, but his face had human history written in wrinkles and in the set of his features,—Felix, and yet a stranger, a man I had never met.

"Felix, how are they?" I didn't dare mention names, for fear of stumbling on death.

"Oh, they're well! And yours?"

"I have none—you know my mother died ten years ago—and I'm not married."

"Alone, Thad?"

"All alone."

"But you live here?"

"No—I live nowhere. Remember how I wanted to go tramping around the world, Felix?" He nodded. "That's all I've been doing. But you, but you, Lixie!"

The old nickname took his voice away for a moment.

"We're here—twenty minutes out! I—oh, I'm a mere merchant—men's furnishings. So you've been wandering about!"

"And nothing to show for it," I said, "but old age."

"Thad," he cried out, "oh, it's good you came to-day, and it's wonderful, it must be telepathy. We've a wedding in our house to-night." He was radiant with the joy of it.

"A wedding," I gasped, "to-night. You have a daughter?"

"Yes, Alberta; she's twenty."

A thrill went through me. Yesterday I parted from him; to-day a daughter of twenty is being married! And he was laughing—

"Oh, I'm a patriarch—six children, three boys, three girls. Look!" Out of his pocket he pulled an eight-sided leather folder, and flung it out with both hands, disclosing eight photographs, and I saw likenesses to mother and father, while my flesh tingled with the unreality of it all.

"Isabel there, and John, are married. I'm a grandfather, Thad!"

He might as well have told me he was two-headed. I leaned, and whispered boy-fashion, "Lixie, let's get up a taffy-pull and invite Laura Shaw, she's sweet on you, Lixie." So I had whispered back in some bygone year; but I added, "And we'll wake up then, for we're dreaming!"

His hand, grasping my arm, was trembling. "Keep still now and come home; you've got to come."

"In these clothes?"

"We'll fix you up. My mother will be tickled to death to see you."

His mother; so she was still living. Of course children think of their parents and their friends' parents as being old even if they are thirty, but I remembered Lixie's mother as a vivacious, quick little woman, quite pretty, and very sensible and shrewd. She used to give me a bar of chocolate when I came over to see Lixie, but once I broke a pane of glass in her house, and she boxed my ears pretty soundly and sent me howling home. My mother made me earn money, five cents a day, helping in the kitchen, and it was ages before I paid for a new pane.

So we took the train out, and in twenty minutes reached a shining, summer-fragrant suburb, with smooth road winding among trees and lawns and picture-houses. All the way we talked, drawing together in tender joy, and Lixie told me about the twenty-six years, the struggle to get a foothold in Pittsburg, the years of debt and toil and poverty, the final modest success. I told him a little about my gipsying, my light, fleet life over the States, the joy and absorption of free traveling. It made him thoughtful.

"Compared with yours," he said, "mine has been a narrow life, Thad; money-getting, children's diseases, school, and marriage—we've had everything in the family from the mumps to scarlet."

"Oh," I murmured, "you've gone deep—I, far. That's the only difference."

"My children can go far for me," he laughed. "There's Henry; he's been as far as the coast, but he's settling down in New York. But of course he'll be here to-day." And, walking in the pleasant sunshine, he told me with great pride of the good marriage his daughter Isabel had made; Fred Walton was a rising young civil engineer.

The house stood a little back from the road, a small, neat, red-and-brown two-story-and-attic, and on the porch, in a deep wicker rocker, sat a little white-haired woman, spectacles on nose, taking the breeze, rocking, and reading;—the vivacious and pretty woman who had boxed my ears.

"Yes, it's my mother!" said Lixie. We went up on the porch, and the little woman looked at me puzzled, and then glanced inquiringly at her son.

"Mother," he said, with a breaking voice, "you remember Thad Stevens?"

She rose and took off her specs.

"Oh, Thad!" she cried, "Thad, I'd never have known you!"

She laughed, inspected me, shook hands. Evidently she was used to all sorts of things happening, and my change and reappearance seemed natural enough.

"How long is it?" she asked; and while Lixie went in to get Laura down, we sat together, and she began immersing me in the past, making it real again, pulling out the old facts with remarkable memory for detail, speaking as one speaks who has reached the peak of life, and having no more to climb, looks back over the landscape of the years.

"Yes, everybody liked your father, children especially. Whenever I think of him"—her laughter was a sweet, smothered tinkle—"I think of his having shaved his beard off. He and your mother were calling one evening, and he whispered to me, 'Lola, I think I'll have my beard shaved off and surprise Edna.' 'Don't do it, Teddy,' I said, and I never thought any more of it, and never missed him. Pretty soon a strange man stood there." She put her hand on my knee and laughed with all her wrinkles, "I never knew him, Thad! But your mother! She looked and looked. All of a sudden she ran out into the pantry and wanted to cry. And what do you think she said to him? 'I won't go home with you, Teddy. People will think I'm with another man!"

My knowledge of the world, my rather light-hearted life, seemed to fail me then. I felt very young and simple, and smelt the very fragrance and tasted the very sensations of those old streets and the busy life with my mother and father and my next-door friends.

Then Lixie came out with a sweet, frail, middle-aged woman, gray-haired, and face drawn a little with much experience and long struggle. She was almost shy, she who had been the little, laughing, brown-eyed girl sweet on Felix Storn, she who had pulled taffy with him all a July afternoon, she who when that first child was born seemed a mere child herself, broken-hearted at nineteen.

"Mr. Stevens!" she said, with quaint awkwardness, "we're surprised and delighted to see you again, to have you here to-day."

She gave me her hand. I felt, however, that my appearance displeased her. I laughed.

"Lixie's going to fix me up—make me respectable!"

Her manner changed then, softened. "I didn't mean—do you want to go up now?"

We went up then, and Lixie and I dressed as if we were boys together on East Eighty-third Street, cursing as of old over stiff shirt and collar buttons. But all the while I heard the voices and laughter of girls in the room adjoining, and I began to feel what a miracle was taking place in the house, how wonderful to a family is a new marriage, and how solemn and exciting it is.

We met Lixie's mother coming up the stairs. "I'm going to pin on Alberta's veil myself," she said. "Isabel looked horrid when she was married!"

Laura was busy in the kitchen; but on the porch I met the two boys, Henry and Felix. I was a mere curiosity to them, but to me they were strangely familiar, so much of their parents was in them, both looks and manners. While we sat, man-fashion, trying to belittle the rising emotions in our hearts, trying to convince ourselves that marriage was an every-day affair, a carriage stopped, and we were overwhelmed with children. It was Isabel and John, one with husband and four-year-old boy and tiny baby, the other with wife and three-year-old girl. And when I saw those children twining their arms about Lixie's neck and whispering "Grandpa!" I felt tremulously old. All the unreality of life returned upon me.

But it was as if the quiet house was invaded by fairies; a light, sweet will-o'-the-wisp gleam played about piping voices, shrill laughter, and pattering feet, and I was down on the floor in no time, romping with boy and girl, and wondering how I was so young, while about me hovered young mothers seemingly crazed over the helpless infant, and making a great business of rubber nipple, safety-pins, and rattle.

Then the air seemed to tremble with something momentous and majestic, and a subdued, nervous stir came upon all. The minister went into the lighted, flower-fragrant parlor, the pianist was hidden in another room, close girl-friends whispered to one another crowding into the crowded house, and John was arranging signals between up stairs and down. A moment the bride leaned over the balustrade, and I heard her low voice:

"He must play a few minutes before I start. Why isn't daddy up here?"

A strange girl whispered beside me, excitedly: "Did you see her? She's beautiful! Her cheeks are all flushed!"

A sort of fear came upon me, an excitement as if I were witnessing something that meant life and death. We crowded into the parlor, sat down, left a lane open to the flower-canopied minister, and all about me were pale faces turned toward the open doorway.

Through the open windows I saw the dark purple of summer twilight, on the low field opposite, I heard a sweet sound of bees and crickets, and within doors a tremulous whispering, a fierce, suppressed activity in the peace of all creation. Awkwardly then a young man, his face haggard, stood beside his father before the minister, and we waited.

I heard John's voice: "Go ahead! Begin! Alberta! Tess!"

The music pulsed slowly, like a slow, mighty wind setting the still, deep waters of our hearts a-tremble, filling us with a joyful oppression; and then Tess, the bridesmaid, moved in alone, putting one foot before the other with all the majesty of eighteen, moved down among us, and in the doorway we saw Felix, head bowed, lips tight, his arm through the arm of the young bride. She was beautiful, giving herself, veiled and blossom-crowned, to the mysterious moment, pacing with never-ending slowness, lids lowered and burning cheeks—the greatest hour of her fate.

They stood side by side, and the simple words sounded, and all that had seemed the shadow of a dream became real. Through these two, I thought, the race rolls on, as it rolled on through Lola Storn, and through her children and her children's children, and all the obscure years of fussing with children, of getting money and meat and drink, of fighting sickness and poverty, and all the feuds, the quarrels, the irritations—yes, all that Felix had passed through, reached meaning through this,—that tillage brought this harvest. All that is beautiful in life was disclosed—the brief and ancient pilgrimage of beings who may have been full of faults and erring days, but now showed the piercing glory of the human heart: courage and reverence and the love that binds us. We trembled with shame-hidden tears as their young voices said so simply that beyond doubt they would love and cherish and honor each other in sickness and misfortune and health and happiness, ever striving to lift each other's lives to higher levels, until the very death. So sure were they of life's grandeur and love's deathlessness. Then the ring, the pronouncement, and the pause: Tess unpinned Alberta's veil, and the young man and wife turned to each other with all the tenderness of love, clasping, kissing deep, and in the sweet release we rose, half-laughing, half-crying, with hearty words, and kissed the lovely new wife.

Then we sat around that sparkling table, and there flowed with the wine the deepest spirit of earth, those waters from hidden springs that reach back a million years: the give-and-take and touch and radiance of the ancient relationships: parents and children, brothers and sisters, husband and wife.

I knew then that what I had seen in the hospital—the tragedy of life and its overcoming by sheer grit—were but items in, the splendid years. Even the heart-break of Felix and Laura over their first-born's death was but a broken corner in the wheat-fields. Not the tragedy and its overcoming alone had brought the race through its dark ages and kept it alive—no, but this—this common family life, so changeless through the centuries, swallowing the tragedy in spaces of white light,—just plain human love.

Late that night I looked out the car-window and saw the Bessemer converter showering up a swirl of golden sparks, and all the water-side flamed: and I knew that the smoky Siren, the dusky sister of Steel, could never wholly crush her peoples, could never really darken their lives; for near and far, and up and down the night, lights burned in shanty and shack, and human families were struggling there. And the love that has not been sullied by a million years of wars and tyrants and devastations and that has been great enough to create all the glories we know, sowing the continent with cities that whisper to one another over the wires—that love is great enough to re-create this world and tame even the Siren City.

It was after midnight that I reported for duty at Crofton Hospital.